The Psychology of Bet Sizing
When considering what size of bet you should make to support the excellent pocket cards you have been dealt or the connection you have made with the flop, there are a number of significant factors that will influence whether you bet will be successful in achieving its objectives or not. In fact the first thing to determine is what your aims are for making a bet in the first place!
In most pre-flop instances, players holding a premium opening hand will try to find the right balance between scaring off any player with a potential drawing hand (hands which might develop into flushes or straights) while still keeping a player in the hand who may be holding a small pair or an ace with a low kicker – hands which you are favourite to beat. In order to do this, you have to consider your table position and the betting tendencies of the players around your table.
You also need to figure in how they have reacted to previous bets that you have made and how you will react if you meet any opposition to your bet – for example, if you are holding a pair of queens in early position, and your bet gets re-raised by the player on the button, are you going to call or raise again (three-bet) to maximise the pot? What if you are forced to go all-in to see this hand? Is it worth your tournament life or ring game chip stack? This scenario might be caused by the player on the button having witnessed you fold to an aggressive re-raise previously, or he might just have better cards than you (although hopefully worse!).
Whereas an initial small bet (from any position) might be interpreted by some players as an indication that you wish to attract players into the pot because you have an excellent hand, others will see it as a sign of weakness and try to bully you out of the pot. Conversely, a bet larger than 6x the big blind may be considered by some as an outrageous bluff to steal the blinds or a sign of a monster hand. This is why understanding how your opponents perceive your betting actions is so important, and how you can take advantage of this when catching a nut hand on the flop to slow play an aggressive opponent all the way to the river.
Another factor that will influence the size of bet you make is relative chip stack sizes. Whereas it is no surprise to see players with large chip stacks (both in tournaments and in cash ring games) betting into the flop on a large percentage of hands, when you are short-stacked, a large bet is perceived as holding a very strong hand – and meeting opposition from a short-stacked player when you yourself have made a small bet may indicate that it is time to withdraw from the hand.
The timing of your bet also plays an important role in determining what size of bet to make and what impact it will have around the table. Quick betting actions are generally interpreted as a novice player getting too excited about the high pocket pair they have been dealt, and a slow deliberate action can be thought of as a player trying to calculate how large a bet the table can stand when he holds the nut hand and wants to maximise the pot. Both of these betting actions can also be applied in reverse in bluffing situations.
As you can see, there are no hard and fast rules about the size of bet you should make. What you need to learn as you gain experience at the virtual felt is what size of bet will result in the desired effect, and the only way to achieve that level of knowledge is to study your opponents and understand the psychology of bet sizing.
